Later
Poe had finally settled in my lap, preening contentedly as I read aloud from Edgar Allan Poe’s complete works. The words blurred softly in the candlelight, warm and comforting, and for the briefest moment, the world felt peaceful again.
But then the thought returned.
I should write this down.
My strange dream, its terror and absurdity, the labyrinthine twists of my own mind… there was something almost poetic in preserving it before it faded completely. Perhaps someday, I would laugh at myself. Or perhaps I would marvel at my mind’s ability to conjure horrors from shadows.
“Yes,” I murmured, stroking Poe’s feathers. “I’ll begin tonight. A proper account.”
Poe fluttered to my shoulder as I rose from bed, his talons gripping lightly.
“Oh, don’t look at me like that,” I teased him. “It isn’t morbid to want to write it down. Besides, it could be a wonderfully good book and you’ll be the main character.”
He puffed his feathers indignantly, muttering a soft croak that, if I stretched my imagination, sounded like approval.
I slipped into my robe and stepped into the hall. The manor was quiet, save for the settling of old wood and the sigh of wind along the windows. I moved softly, Poe’s wings brushing my cheek as he adjusted his balance.
Sylum’s study was dim when I entered, the embers in the hearth reduced to a faint glow. The familiar scent of ink and aged paper settled over me. I crossed to his desk, pulling open the drawers in search of parchment.
Nothing. Only ledgers, receipts, and maps of the estate.
“I know he keeps spare paper somewhere,” I said, kneeling to check the lower compartments. My fingers brushed the back of the drawer and a faint click sounded.
A false bottom slid away beneath my touch.
I leaned closer.
There, tucked beneath the hidden panel, were two objects:
A slim leather-bound diary.
And a file bearing a pressed wax seal I recognized instantly.
My breath hitched.
Briarwood Asylum for the Insane.
A tremor ran through me as I lifted the diary first. Gooseflesh prickled my arms as my heart began to pound unnaturally in my chest.
It looked worn. Thumbed-through and familiar.
Poe shifted uneasily, feathers ruffling.
I opened it to the first page.
The handwriting was mine.
… Something strange is happening at Blackthorn Manor. Perhaps it is only my imagination or the unease of being thrust beneath an unfamiliar roof. I admit, it is a feeling more than fact, but believe me. I cannot prove this just yet, but I will.
You simply must believe me.
My heart slammed once, painfully, against my ribs.
No. No, these were… these were the pages I had written in my dream. The same thoughts. The same terror. Word for word.
But how?
I had never actually written these, had I? I had merely dreamed of them…
I turned another page with trembling fingers.
Another entry from the dream.
My vision swam.
“This… this isn’t real,” I whispered.
Poe croaked sharply, hopping down to the desk. His wings flared with agitation or perhaps fear.
“Did I write this?” I asked him. “Did I…?”
He only stared.
I set the journal aside as the room tilted slightly, and reached for the file. My fingers hesitated on the seal.
Briarwood.
The place from my dream. The place where my mother had supposedly wasted away. The place I believed was all made up in my mind… conjured by a nightmare.
The seal cracked softly beneath my thumb.
Inside was not my mother’s file.
It was mine.
My name stared back at me. Beside it, the name from my dream:
Patient: Lenore Deveroux (“Lucy”)
Admitted for: vivid hallucinations, delusions of persecution, violent delusional episodes, inability to distinguish reality from fantasy, second personality.
My pulse hammered so violently I thought I might faint. The words blurred, my eyes burning.
I forced myself to read the doctor’s notes.
Doctor’s Observations—Dr. Julien Deveroux
The patient has made substantial progress under my private care at Blackthorn Manor following her discharge from Briarwood Asylum.
However, a recurring complication persists: the emergence of a secondary personality whom the patient never acknowledges consciously.
This entity refers to itself as “Lucy.”
It is my professional assessment that Lenore is entirely unaware of Lucy’s existence, and that Lucy manifests exclusively during periods of extreme psychological stress. Lenore seems to have no memory of things that occur while Lucy is present.
This includes the events that occurred on the cliff that night.
Lucy’s delusions are fixed and vivid. They revolve primarily around complex conspiracies involving the patient’s late husband—my brother, Sylum Deveroux.
Lucy remains convinced he poisoned her and engineered elaborate attempts on her life.
More recently, however, her delusions have shifted toward me, claiming that I conspired against her, acting as Sylum’s “evil twin”.
I believe this is a direct result of Lucy trying to redirect blame to keep Lenore safe from the truth.
It is my professional opinion that Lucy shot Sylum on the cliffs that night and that Lenore was not present in any conscious capacity.
Her fragile mind cannot reconcile the event.
Thus her psyche has constructed elaborate narratives to shield her.
Lucy, protective and violent, emerges to absorb Lenore’s guilt.
The fantasies of poisoning, pursuit, and conspiracy are her mind’s attempt to justify the violence committed.
There are brief moments when Lenore begins to remember the cliffs. However, when this happens, Lucy emerges instantaneously.
Each time Lucy emerges, the episode of delusions begins anew. Lucy slowly unravels with tales of poisoning and accusations against me and the servants, or rather my brother, Sylum, who she believes me to be.
I have chosen, for her safety and mine, to allow Lenore (and Lucy) to believe that I am Sylum, and that he lives still.
The household staff has cooperated fully with this therapeutic fiction.
This illusion stabilizes her, though only temporarily.
I do fear that Lucy may realize the truth and have some memory of killing Sylum, though she has yet to admit it.
When she does emerge, she refers to me as Sylum as if she refuses to acknowledge the memory as fact.
I recognize the ethical complexity of this arrangement. Yet confronting her with the truth would almost certainly induce a catastrophic break. Lucy’s hostility is potent, and I have reason to believe that she, not Lenore, poses a physical risk.
It is also necessary to acknowledge that my feelings for Lenore have grown increasingly… complicated. When she is herself—calm, soft-spoken, gentle—there is no trace of madness about her. Only the shadow of it. It is for this reason I fear I have become too willing to shelter her and care for her.
Though Lenore experiences no other sign of madness when she is herself, she does present vivid auditory hallucinations, particularly involving her pet raven, “Poe,” whom she believes speaks in complete sentences.
I have never once heard the bird utter a word.
Her recent fall from her horse resulted in head trauma, triggering an extended period of psychotic dreams wherein she claimed to have lived through a “nightmare” of being poisoned, hunted, and conspired against. She awoke as “Lucy” which may further prove my suspicions.
When Lenore does resurface, she retains no memory of Lucy’s actions—neither the shooting nor the delusions that came before. This, too, confirms my hypothesis: two distinct entities coexist within her mind, only one of which comprehends the truth.
The stress of relocating to Blackthorn, combined with an unresolved childhood trauma, may have triggered Lucy’s emergence. In protecting Lenore from psychological harm, Lucy has committed violent acts and constructed alternate realities to justify them.
Despite Lenore’s improvements, she maintains a fragile grip on reality and will likely never accept her illness or Sylum’s death at her hands unless I can find a way to remove “Lucy” from her mind.
I pressed a trembling hand to my mouth.
No. This was wrong.
This was all wrong.
I wasn’t insane…
I wasn’t broken…
I didn’t kill Sylum. I couldn’t have…
My breath fractured in my chest, shallow and sharp. The air grew too thin. My skin felt too tight. My heartbeat was too loud, too violent, rattling my ribs like a trapped creature desperate to escape.
“I’m not insane,” I cried softly into the spinning air. “I’m not. I’m not—I’m not—”
Poe hopped closer, tapping his beak against my wrist mournfully as though offering a benediction to a dying soul.
My tears splashed onto the page, the words blurring until they bled into one another. I wiped them away quickly, almost angrily, as if erasing the evidence of my unraveling might somehow reverse it.
Behind me, the study door creaked.
I froze.
A warm, familiar voice entered the quiet.
“Lenore?”
I turned.
Sylum—no, not Sylum at all. Julien—stood in the doorway, the firelight gilding his silhouette, his expression gentle and concerned.
He met my gaze, searching my eyes as only a doctor might, and sighed. “Not for long then, right?”
But I saw it then.
Just for an instant.
His eyes glimmered with something else. A flicker behind the amber. A double shadow. A second face superimposed for the briefest moment over his own.
I blinked, and it was gone.
“Are you alright?” he asked softly, stepping in, voice warm as a hearth fire. “You shouldn’t be out of bed.”
My fingers curled convulsively around the file, knuckles whitening as memory detonated behind my eyes.
Sylum on the cliff, his voice breaking as he begged me to believe him.
A gunshot.
Screams.
Another one flashed—this time from an earlier moment. His hand over mine as he urged me to take my medicine. “Please, my love. This will help you rest.”
Then another…
Nelly crying as footmen held her back, “Your Grace, please put the pistol down!”
Then, the stark white walls of Briarwood.
“I killed him…” I cried, the words fading as my body was racked with sobs. No not I…
Lucy had killed him.
It had been Lucy all along. The voice… the evil that lived within me. The darkest part of me that crawled into my mind and convinced me that Sylum… my beloved Sylum… was poisoning me and plotting to drive me to madness… to lock me away.
My screams of agony echoed through the manor as my whole body convulsed with a pain so breathtaking that I thought my heart would shatter.
He reached for me, slowly, carefully, as though approaching something breakable.
“Come to bed, Lenore,” he murmured. “You’re overtired.”
Poe’s wings snapped open, feathers bristling, his cry sharp and almost human.
“Nevermore!”
Julien glanced at the bird without expression.
My breath seized. “You hear him now, don’t you?! You must! He’s warning me!”
He smiled patiently. The kind one gives a madwoman. “Come now,” he said gently. “Let’s not start this again. Poe can’t speak, Lenore.”
The room warped around me. Julien’s face wavered, splitting and shifting, becoming Sylum’s, then not, then both.
Something in my mind—the thinnest barrier between sanity and the abyss—snapped shut with the quiet, decisive click of a lock. A wall slammed down. A veil fell.
The memories of Sylum’s death on the cliff dimmed, then extinguished, snuffed out like a candle being pinched.
My knees buckled.
I squeezed my eyes shut as the darkness surged, velvety and comforting, swallowing the jagged edges of truth before they could tear me apart completely.
The file slipped from her trembling grasp as I—Lucy—stepped forward.
I rose within the mind, smoothing the fractures, gathering Lenore in my arms like a child and drawing her gently, mercifully, into the deepest corridors of our shared skull.
Into the room where she kept her most terrible memories buried.
Where she would sleep while I kept her safe.
I emerged into the world with her tears still damp on our cheeks.
I turned toward him, toward the man who believed he held dominion over my mind, and smiled with tranquil sweetness.
“Sylum,” I sighed, “I had the strangest dream.”
His smile was small. Exhausted. He nodded with a solemn awareness that Lenore was gone once again.
“Hello, Lucy…”
And the world rearranged itself around us once more.